Chelsea Clinton: A Day in the Life (Slideshow)

Chelsea Clinton in the ballroom of the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, following a plenary session for CGI America.

One face that incoming New York University freshmen might be surprised to see on campus this September is Chelsea Clinton‘s. The former First Daughter’s role as a multi-faith leader at NYU is only the latest in a series of steps the once-sheltered political scion has recently taken into the limelight. A string of public forays—her nationally-covered wedding to investment banker Marc Mezvinsky in 2010, her role as a full-time correspondent at NBC News in 2011—punctuate a lifetime that has otherwise been studiously low-profile and press-shy.

But her newly conspicuous life is perhaps most pronounced in her work with the family foundation, recently renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Foundation, an acknowledgement of her increasingly visible role within the institution. Just last week, she was front-and-center of the cameras during a trip to Africa to bring attention to health care issues and economic growth in places like Zambia and Tanzania. That role also was on full display in June at CGI America, the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual summit dedicated to economic recovery, which drew nearly a 1,000 politicos and business leaders from across the country to the City of Big Shoulders. Striding across the lobby of Chicago’s Sheraton Hotel, where the summit took place, hand outstretched in greeting, a gaggle of assistants in tow, the articulate 33-year-old bore little resemblance to the gawky teenager who was rarely caught on camera during her father’s presidency in the mid-90s.

She attributes her emergence as a multi-tasking power player to forces beyond her famous parents. “My grandmother was hugely instrumental in my taking a more public role,” she says of Hillary’s late mother, Dorothy Howell Rodham. “I hope she’d be proud of me.”

The flurry of activity has provoked speculation about whether Chelsea might herself one day run for office—queries she quickly parries. Her mother’s deliberations about another presidential run would likely occupy a more prominent part of her life in months to come.

Over the course of that busy June day, Chelsea glad-handed with attendees, moderated panels, spouted job recovery statistics, compared notes with her parents, and offered what sounded like a page out of her own playbook to a workshop about women in the workforce: “You don’t know until you ask. You don’t know until you try.”

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